Down with the Cities!

by Tadashi Nakashima

Long ago, in China, they say that even with nine years' worth of rice stored they still had shortages. So what is all the excitement over a three or four months' excess?

You, in the cities! This is the rice you're eating. Offer all those office buildings as rice storage facilities. We should fill those buildings up with unhulled rice. Should there ever be a food shortage, all those office buildings and hotels will be worthless compared to rice. When the Pol Pot regime instituted the barter system, the capitol of Phnom Penh was instantly converted into an empty shell. This is because the former residents left the hotels and offices behind and went from farming village to farming village in search of food. If we were to set a nine years' supply of rice as our goal there would be no shortages because of frost damage, and no need to import rice; at the same time there would be no need for an acreage reduction policy.

In such a situation there should be no need to discuss costs. Since this is the rice that they would all be eating, they should do the work for free. When it comes down to actually carrying out this plan, the money economy will probably fall apart, anyway. [17]

The second of the human-caused disasters is the infrastructure industry. In order to build infrastructure, the government blows trillions of yen destroying the paddies tilled by generations of ancestors, and for that reason we are seeing a reduction in the rice harvests (let us not overlook the effects of the dense planting by machines, the damage due to causing the rice to grow too thickly, and the ill effects of the great quantities of chemicals).

The government says that the farmers benefit from infrastructure, but we are actually the victims of it. In reality those who benefit are the government; the farming co-ops; the manufacturers of machines, fertilizers, and agricultural chemicals; the rice wholesalers; and the consumers, all of whom belong to the cities. What this means is that the city has created a system by which it can control the production of our staple food as it pleases. The stupid farmers have given the city permanent control over the production of rice for a mere pittance in subsidies.

Our traditional method of producing rice, which boasts a history of several thousand years, has also been negated by the city (government, farming co-ops, machinery manufacturers), and the city has been able to achieve a system of rice production that suits its own purpose, that is, a system which makes full use of large machinery and agricultural chemicals, and which saddles the farmers with debts. That this new system of rice production (involving the planting of immature seedlings, dense planting, and early planting) is susceptible to frost damage, is the price the city must naturally pay.

The third is the desire of the Epicurean city dwellers to eat the famous varieties of particularly tasty rice. It is for this reason that the farmers plant more and more "sasanishiki" and "koshihikari," strains that are particularly susceptible to frost, blight, and wind damage. On the other hand, strains that are resistant to cold and disease, since they do not taste as good, have all but disappeared from the paddies. This is why I say that frost damage is human-caused.

The fourth is the decline in the will of the farmers to produce. It would seem to be a mistake to ascribe the loss of the farmers' enthusiasm to the city, but sad to say, it is completely the fault of the city. It is because the city has meddled with the production of food that the farmers have lost their will to produce. Who was it that promoted the eating of bread (that considered eating rice bad) and increased the imports of wheat? It was not the farmers of Japan. It was clearly the city — the politicians and traders and nutritionists of the tertiary industries — who made deals with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and grain traders. It was then that the farmers began to lose the will to produce.

The creation of agribusiness in the early 1960s by means of the structural improvement of agriculture, in which the government was highly instrumental, resulted in debts for the farmers, the increase in the scale of agricultural operations, and the supply of great amounts of agricultural produce, which was accomplished by making the farmers busier than ever. The ability of the farmers to supply themselves with food — their independence — was completely lost at this time, and agriculture became highly dependent on the secondary and tertiary industries (chemical fertilizers, machinery, fuel, subsidies, etc.). This dependence is in other words the loss of autonomy; the farmers became prisoners and lackeys totally controlled by the politicos, the co-ops, the manufacturers, the trading companies, and the consumers, and their will to produce rice declined precipitously.

And what did they do to the remaining small-scale farmers? They made a big deal of the difference in income between the secondary/tertiary industries and the farmers, and promoted the move to the cities. As the number of farmers shrank, the urban population burgeoned, and where the government was not successful in getting them off the farm, they at least managed to create many Sunday farmers and part-time farmers. So the farmers, who were busy making money in town, lost interest in rice production, and they performed field work hastily with machinery, and neglected to apply compost to their paddies.